PowerSchool Software Helps School Districts 55
nycroft writes "Apple is helping school districts help teachers with PowerSchool, a platform-independent, web-based, student information system. PowerSchool enables teachers and administrators in school districts of up to 10,000 students to produce schedules and reports in minutes, and to generate attendance records, grade checks, report cards, transcripts, and form letters in just a few clicks. And all in real-time." It also allows such real-time access by parents to their kids' grades; I am so glad this wasn't around when I was a kid.
It's about time!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Teachers today have to do way to much with way too few tools for way too little pay. Hopefully, schools/districts will take advantage of this to make teachers' lives easier.
Re:It's about time!! (Score:2, Insightful)
And, it's not for lack of communication or trying on my wife's part. She writes a weekly email newsletter and maintains a regularly updated class website. Of course, that's in addition to the requisite open-house and conferences...
You can have all of
Re:It's about time!! (Score:1)
Re:It's about time!! (Score:2)
Just last month I heard a guy on radio, discussing some topic relating to education, mention that the best teachers usually quit or leave within their first few years.
At the time I thought to myself "hhmm, maybe..." Only now do I fully realize how true this statement/claim was.
I'm trying to place a source to this information, and I've found a couple that seem to confirm:
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/tm_printstory . cf m?slug=07voices.h11
http://www.usatoda
Re:It's about time!! (Score:1)
Re:not the best idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:not the best idea (Score:1, Funny)
Sounds like your high school had much more serious issues to focus on...
This has been around for a while, hasn't it? (Score:2, Funny)
-- shayborg
Wow 10000!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
PS -> If it's platform independant, why is this in the mac section?
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:2)
It was nice to be able to see what my teacher had recorded for my grade without having to make an appointment, luckily though it was only a trial test while I was still in school so my parents never bothered with it. It would've gotten really old t
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm really curious about the security implications of this system. If Joe Elementary Hacker (and yes he is out there) can mark his enemies absent an
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:3, Informative)
So this is a pretty big market.
To work with those super large districts (the ones with the other half of the kids) is orders of magnitude more difficult I'm sure due to the customizations you can expect them to require.
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:2)
'Cause Apple is selling it?
I'm guessing that it is a WebObjects App/suite...
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1)
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:2)
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1)
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1)
Re:Wow 10000!!! (Score:1)
It's in the Mac section because the PowerSchool Server only runs on a Mac.
Last I heard, it isn't even a native OS X application. They might have changed that by now.
cool (Score:3, Funny)
Re:cool (Score:1)
Nothing new here, move along... (Score:4, Informative)
Powerschool was offering this functionality long before it was assimilated [macobserver.com] by Apple in 2001, and at $6-$10 per student per year, Apple is not helping anyone, there are selling software.
Re:Nothing new here, move along... (Score:2)
Business went as usual, duh
Re:Nothing new here, move along... (Score:2)
The tech specs mention that it's a service and doesn't require any hardware at the school. They even allow an outside ASP. Heck,
I think that puts your comment in a different light.
Time factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Not Really News... (Score:4, Informative)
Think Secret [thinksecret.com] has also detailed a lot of the fallout.
We (ND) were originally using the brand new in 2001 (and beta quality) PowerSchool Enterprise (PSE), a completely web-based application that used WebObjects on the backend. This application was intended to serve very large districts and small states like ours. Although Apple/PowerSchool put most of their resources into PSE instead of the well established PowerSchool Student Information System (PSIS), the smaller scale client-server application, they continually failed to make deadlines, fix known problems, and even deliver features and performance comparable to PSIS. Problems eventually got so bad that Apple scrapped the PowerSchool Enterprise product and now has just the PSIS product, intended for smaller school districts. North Dakota is now using PSIS, and although teachers are happier and performance is better, you can imagine the cost involved at the state level with a server for each school and at the school level in having to support a desktop client application. At least we have a working product now...
Re:Not Really News... (Score:2)
Since, I'm only a student, all I have gotten to see is the user side. Thanks for switching to PSIS. The WebObject version just sucked, every week the thing would be down, not that it mattered, the teacher had no clue how to use it.
"...although teachers are happier and performance is better..."
thats an understatement.
If you here in Bismarck, I would enjoy meeting you. No one to talk to about to about CS in this god forsaken city.
BTW...thanks for closing off linuxconf and a
program (Score:2)
Re:program (Score:4, Informative)
The initial post was incorrect in saying it was "platform-independent, web-based". The client program for PSIS (PowerGrade) only works on Macintosh computers or Windows computers. The PowerSchool program that was completely web-based, PowerSchool Enterprise, was taken off the market late last year.
Re:program (Score:1)
I was quoting Apple. Please refer to the article [apple.com] for further research. It states:
PowerSchool, a web-based student information system from Apple...And because PowerSchool is platform independent, it can be accessed from any Windows or Mac computer with a web browser and supports Windows and Mac server platforms.
If there's something you know that Apple doesn't, we'd like to know. Looking under the Technology [apple.com] tab in the a
Re:program (Score:2, Informative)
I never claimed to know something Apple doesn't, but I have been working with PowerSchool for almost 2 years, longer than Apple has owned PowerSchool. PowerSchool is not a new program.
What is mentioned under the technlogy [apple.com] section is partialy true. The school administration functions and parent/student function are all web-based
Think different? Or not? (Score:4, Interesting)
While I love and use Apple's products, I would expect something better from a company challenging us to "Think Different."
Re:Think different? Or not? (Score:3, Interesting)
The funny thing is, they only realise this for the services they provide (that they bought from somewhere else) and not the hardware that they provide (PPC).
*shrug*
Re:Think different? Or not? (Score:3, Informative)
We have implemented PowerSchool in our school and I can tell you that it handles scheduling issues just fine. Our middle school uses a rotating A-B schedule with anywhere from 6-12 periods, including an advisory period that must always come first. Second, Powerschool allows you to create any grade scale you want and assign any numbers to them, thus you can create "My Blah School's Grade Scale" and use that when storing
This product doesn't really help teachers. (Score:1, Insightful)
The Technology? (Score:2)
Re:The Technology? (Score:2)
Re:The Technology? (Score:2)
Re:The Technology? (Score:1)
Apple took OPENSTEP Enterprise and created WebObjects with that. It used to and I believe still runs on PPC and x86. Plus at one time they ran on NeXT boxes.
This ability to run under Windows NT is a leftover from the NeXT days. Actually I think that th
Re:The Technology? (Score:1, Informative)
I administer it in our district.
Apple's ideal. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple also claimed to offer hosting in an Apple datacenter of the PowerSchool application and data, to remove that burden from school districts. They claimed that "you should see our server rooms light up at five after eight" when parents are supposedly checking the just-posted attendance logs for that day.
There were a lot of other features that seemed useful, however most of it depends on how much the teacher wants to use the system: posting all the homework daily so parents know what their kids should be doing that night; checking off and posting whether that homework was completed on a daily basis.
Pretty powerful stuff, yet all dependant upon whether the schools can bear the cost, and how much time the teacher will commit to using the system. I can't vouch for how much of it actually "works" if a teacher is committed to using it as I haven't seen it in action.
A sample site? (Score:1)
Powerschool is just another school MGMT System (Score:2, Informative)